Waiting Room

by Jane Andrews

It’s been said that you are only as happy as your most unhappy child, and I believe there is some truth to that. Lately, I am all about my twenty-six-year-old daughter, Phoebe, who keeps veering into crisis like a motorist drifting into oncoming traffic on a highway. For instance, Phoebe and I recently visited the Emergency Room. This was on the after-hours advice of the doctor on call with our GP. Phoebe had told him that she was having trouble breathing, she was dizzy, she couldn’t feel her hands and her legs didn’t work right. She told him she hurt all over.

At the admitting desk, a flamboyant young man and an even younger woman with a volunteer tag asked Phoebe what issue brought her to the ER. “A broken heart?” Phoebe suggested. A nine-year relationship had ended.  Phoebe was entered in the system and we were sent around the corner to the noncontagious area to wait for someone to see her. I sat next to a guy about thirty years old in a ball cap with a gauze bandage on his left thumb that gave it the dimensions of an ear of corn. Volunteer Girl came in and began to quiz Phoebe. Pain in the left arm? A crushing feeling? No, no. I told her. Nothing like angina or anything like that. No need to get the paddles and clear. A broken heart. Volunteer Girl seemed relieved she would not have to write up an incident report and she returned to the front desk. Phoebe turned to me. “That’s a real thing, you know. Broken Heart Syndrome.” I did know. She went back to tapping on her iPhone.

I’ve always thought of love as a verb. Full of energy and action and visible (if subtle) display. It’s come to me today that no one tells you how much waiting is required of deep love. How much sitting is necessary. How very much boredom you must be willing to embrace. A good training ground for demonstrating that level of devotion is the Emergency Room. “Emergency” is a relative term, and the person who brings what they consider an urgent illness or injury to the room is likely to find that the staff on duty don’t consider their condition time-sensitive at all. It is they, who are the professionals, who will determine what is an emergency. Your emergency may have no more value to them than the Canadian quarter the lobby drink machine won’t accept.

Given five minutes warning, I know how to wait in an Emergency Room. It’s always cold, bring a sweatshirt. It’s incredibly tedious even with five TVs bolted near the ceiling. Bring a paperback or two. Bring your cell phone and the charger. Bring cash for sodas, Nabs, whatever. I bring earplugs. ChapStick. Come with the knowledge that you will wait. A long time. And the long time will seem much longer than if you were at home. When you get home, you’ll want to take a shower.

If you are accompanying someone you love to the Emergency Room and find yourself remembering random bits of poetry, keep it to yourself.

You have to be sure the other people in the ER are open to conversation. Read their body language. The young man with the gauze-wrapped thumb in the chair next to me looked relaxed. He was wearing a Nationals T-shirt.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I sliced off the end of my thumb, chopping onions. It’s just a little scrap of skin holding it on.”

I gave an appreciative whistle. He lowered his arm.

“How long you been waiting?”

He looked at the clock on the wall. “About an hour and fifteen minutes.”

I thought about a Robert Frost poem, “Out, Out,” about a kid who cuts his finger or hand or something off and bleeds to death. And they, since they were not the one dead, returned to their affairs.

“You could’ve bled to death by now,” I remarked.

He nodded yes, shook his head in disbelief. His phone went off with a musical ring tone I didn’t recognize and he shifted his attention to it. Phoebe was texting someone with her own thumbs.

I thought about a Sylvia Plath poem, in which the speaker accidentally cuts herself instead of the onion. What a thrill… a hinge of skin, a flap like a hat. A disturbing and beautiful and playful poem. If you are accompanying someone you love to the Emergency Room and find yourself remembering random bits of poetry, keep it to yourself. Tuck your poetry fragments away for later in the way you would save a cookie. The chances that the person you are with will know or care about the fragments is no more likely than that they will be seen by a doctor right away unless they have a gunshot wound. Still, poetry can help you wait.

*     *     *

After the trip to the Emergency Room, I waited with Phoebe in her bedroom for several days. Phoebe lives with us while she works part time and finishes a second degree in horticulture. She has a king size bed that she shares with her laptop, notebook, phone, and other detritus. She has a TV on a long table opposite the bed. A cat or two and the dog will often settle in for a nap or to be petted. I sat in the blue chair off to the side by the door. I know how to sit in Phoebe’s room with her, too. I had on sweats and a T-shirt, sock feet. A glass of water or juice or wine. I had a book. I had my phone. “What can I do for you, Phee?” I’d say. “What do you need?” It wasn’t until several days had passed that Phoebe would ask for a Powerade or a piece of toast. She lost six pounds in four days.

She said, “Will you stay with me?”

“Of course,” I said.

She slept or watched The Munsters or Frasier on YouTube. She texted. She went to the bathroom. She slept some more. I stayed. Just as I had when she was younger and sick. Just as when she was a kid and throwing up, there really wasn’t much for me to do, except wipe her face with a cold wet cloth and hold her hand.

“Will you spend the night in here with me?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

I got her a cold wet cloth, more to make her feel cared for than to bring down a fever, although she did have a little one.

Phoebe burrowed into the covers. I sat and read and waited. Sometimes, I got on the other side of her king size bed and slept, too. She’d rise up in the night like a sea creature breeching the surface, see that I was there—awake, because she was—and she’d drop back into her blankets.

*     *     *

After a week or so Phoebe returned to work. Phoebe has been cautioned about being too cheerful and friendly with the customers. They asked her not to laugh so much, until they realized that engaging with her customers didn’t slow down her checkout speed. The day Phoebe went back to work, the store manager sent her home after one hour.

At Phoebe’s request, I drove her and her broken heart to a therapist, Susan, who’s helped me off and on over the years. Susan and Phoebe hit it off right away. Susan prescribed Xanax and breathing exercises and set up more appointments. Phoebe had sessions with Susan two or three times a week. Since Phoebe has never needed a driver’s license to go to work or to school, I ended up taking her to therapy.

Here’s another skill deep love requires. Shutting up. The ability to know when to shut up and to actually do it is closely tied to waiting.

The therapy practice Susan belongs to has a waiting room of slick, stain-resistant upholstered chairs and loveseats, and side tables with copies of WebMD Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Arthritis Today, Time, and Golf Digest. Three times a week I waited for Phoebe and listened to dreary music and read the magazines. By the end of Phoebe’s third fifty-minute hour with Susan, I’d gone through all the magazines, including Golf Digest, which might as well be titled A Guide to Mind Crushing Ennui as far as I’m concerned. So, for entertainment, I observed the people who came and sat near me, trying to determine who was a patient and who was a waiter like me. What issues brought them to this room of boring music, bad art, and dim lighting? I tried to read their posture, clothes, gestures, and conversation with the receptionists. I eavesdropped on the dialogue of people who were obviously there together. They frequently ignored each other and tapped on their smart phones, a sound like muffled telegraph keys. The etiquette of therapy waiting rooms is different than the ER. You do not make small talk in a room in which mental illness, emotional distress, and trauma cling to everyone like sweat. It’s bad form. Should you run into these same people in the organic produce section of the Harris Teeter, you do not acknowledge that you’ve ever seen them before.

*     *     *

Phoebe began to leave sessions with Susan in wary optimism. Things might work out. A plan of action and even a Plan B were possibilities. Within a couple of weeks, on a late Sunday afternoon, I went looking for Phoebe to ask her a question and found her pacing in the backyard. She was clutching her cell, waiting on a phone call. Her breathing was rapid and she was shaking a little. She was on the cusp of a panic attack.

“Talk to me,” I said, sitting down and watching her stride to and fro like an agitated animal. “What’s happened?”

Phoebe filled me in as she continued to walk laps. I brought her some juice. I thought stopping to drink and swallow might interrupt the advance of hyperventilating. It worked for a little while. I asked a few more questions and Phoebe answered.

Here’s another skill deep love requires. Shutting up. The ability to know when to shut up and to actually do it is closely tied to waiting. This ability doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m still struggling with it. Timing can be so important.

This late Sunday afternoon I lost the struggle. I had shut up for a long time. I had been careful not to push, not to judge. I had been waiting for the crisis to pass. Until this sultry August evening. This time I said I was angry and frustrated. I told Phoebe what I’d like to do and say if I hadn’t been raised with good manners. I called someone she cares about a pussy. I called other people insane. I also asked her forgiveness. I told her that I felt like I was watching her bleed and that I felt I could do nothing to stop the bleeding. It was not her my anger and frustration were directed at, but at the sources of her profound unhappiness. “Forgive me for not being diplomatic,” I said. “Please.”

She stopped pacing and looked me in the face for the first time. “It’s okay,” she said. Her cell phone rang and I went inside to give her privacy. Later, she sought me out and told me things were better. She was, in fact, happy. Everything would be fine and resolved in September.

“What’s changed?” I asked.

She shrugged. It didn’t matter. She was happy, that was enough. This time instead of asking more questions, I shut up.

Because I remembered that years ago when Phoebe was in preschool, she and her friends were playing while a couple of other mothers and I sat and watched.

“Phoebe is just your Mini Me,” Jessie said.

“We share the same soul,” I told her.

Phoebe looked up from drawing a mandala in the sand. She’s always been an artist.

“I want my own soul,” she insisted.

I laughed. “Okay.”

And I remembered that when she was a little older, Phoebe and I were playing outside on another late sunny summer afternoon. Our shadows were long and sharply defined on the sand around the swings.

“Let’s share shadows!” Phoebe said.

So, I stood behind her as she sat in the swing and we became one shadow with many moving parts. Then I pushed her and our shadows separated soundlessly only to merge again briefly and leave once more.

Phoebe told me a couple of days ago, “It’s hard to wait until the end of September.”

“It must be,” I said. “It must feel like forever.”

What I think, is Phoebe is waiting for September and it is hard. Learning how to wait is very hard. She has regained her optimism and works to hold on to it. I am waiting with her for September, without optimism, but not without hope. I hope the end of September will be worth the wait. And I will try to shut up, try remember that Phoebe’s soul belongs to her, but that I may, from time to time, be invited to share shadows.

 

Jane Andrews has a BA in creative writing from NC State University. Andrews teaches writing and poetry courses through Duke continuing education and is a writing coach at Central Carolina Community College She is nonfiction editor at Glint Literary Journal and a poetry editor at 3 Elements Review. She has earned awards in memoir, personal essay, and poetry. Andrews’ fiction, essays, memoir, and poetry have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Red Clay Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Verdad, Kindred, The News & Observer, and other publications. She is a past board member of Carolina Wren Press and the NC Poetry Society. Andrews is a freelance writing instructor, workshop facilitator, and book editor.